Improving Resource and Energy Efficiency for Cloud 3D through Excessive Rendering Reduction

The rise of cloud gaming makes interactive 3D applications an emerging type of data center workload. However, the excessive rendering in current cloud 3D systems leads to large gaps between the cloud and client frame rates (FPS, frames per second), thus wasting resources and power. Although FPS regulation can remove excessive rendering, due to the highly-varying frame processing time and the use of rendering delays, existing cloud FPS regulation solutions have low FPS and slow motion-to-photon (MtP) latency, causing violations of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements.

In this paper, we present a novel cloud FPS regulation solution, called OnDemand Rendering (ODR). ODR employs multi-buffering, dynamic rendering delay/acceleration, and input processing prioritization to reduce excessive rendering and ensure QoS satisfaction. ODR was evaluated in our private cloud and Google cloud. Evaluation results showed that ODR effectively removed excessive rendering, thus improving DRAM performance by 19% and reducing power usage by 16% over no FPS regulation. Better memory efficiency also allowed ODR to increase client FPS by 5.5%. Moreover, ODR reduced average MtP latency by more than 92% and outperformed existing FPS regulations. More importantly, ODR's high FPS and low latency make it feasible to deploy 3D applications to conventional public clouds.